Rick Rule on Agnico Eagle: The Same Stock at a Higher Price Is Still Cheaper Than Before

In a wide-ranging January 2026 interview on Palisades Gold Radio, resource investor Rick Rule spent a few minutes explaining why he is actively adding to Agnico Eagle Mines right now, even after a multi-year run in gold stocks. His core argument is one investors regularly miss: at a higher share price, Agnico Eagle can still be a better value than it was at half the current price.

**Why the math changed even as the price went up**

Rule uses a single metric to evaluate senior gold producers: the net present value (NPV) of expected future cash flows, divided by today's enterprise value. He argues that as gold moved from roughly $3,000 to about $4,200 per ounce, the share prices of senior producers like Agnico Eagle climbed only about 25% on top of the move in the metal. That is far less than the move in gold itself, which is what should happen — the gains are absorbed into margin, not paid out as multiple expansion.

The arithmetic, in his framing: at $2,000 gold, a producer like Agnico Eagle was breaking even including the cost of capital. At $3,000 gold, the same operation was running an announced margin of about $1,000 per ounce. At today's $4,200, the announced margin has roughly doubled to $2,000 per ounce — and, Rule notes, reserves and production have grown alongside it. Margin dollars are what drive NPV in this business, so doubling the per-ounce margin while growing the asset base produces a step-change in underlying value, not just a step-change in price.

That is why, Rule says, "these stocks are cheaper than they were when the stocks were selling for half the price."

**What Rule actually did**

The interview is more than theoretical. In August 2025, Rule sold 25% of his junior gold portfolio — enough to recoup every dollar he had put into the sector since 2020 and to cover the capital gains bill on the sale. He then redeployed the proceeds in two places: oil and gas, and a package of senior precious-metals names. That package explicitly included physical gold, Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, and Agnico Eagle. As Rule puts it, he "reverse diversified from alpha to beta in the sector" — moving from speculative single-asset stories to investment-grade producers and royalties because the risk-adjusted pricing between the two tiers had become unfavourable.

**The price-versus-value lesson**

Rule returns to Agnico Eagle near the end of the interview as a teaching example. His point: the company's NPV at today's gold price is higher, relative to the share price, than it was a year and a half ago when the share price was roughly half as high. Most investors, he argues, anchor on the share price instead of value, and miss that the gap between the two is what actually determines the return from here. Investors who waited for confirmation from the price chart paid for that confirmation by buying into a smaller discount.

**Where the bullish case has limits**

Rule is not making an unhedged call. He stresses that his argument is conditional on gold continuing to compound in nominal US-dollar terms over time, which he expects but does not promise. He has also trimmed exposure — the August 2025 sale and the recent pivot toward investment-grade names both reflect that he sees less asymmetry in juniors and similar names than he did two or three years ago. He notes that money has "cascaded down the sector" faster than in any prior precious-metals bull market he has seen, leaving juniors expensive relative to seniors by historical standards.

For investors looking at Agnico Eagle specifically, the takeaway is Rule's framing rather than a price target: the relevant question is not how high the share price has already gone, but how wide the gap is between today's price and the NPV implied by $4,200 gold and the company's current reserve and production base. That gap, on Rule's analysis, is wider than it was when the share price was half as much — which is the opposite of what intuition suggests.